Mitt Romney’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination has yielded a record number of stories with some variation on the title “The Mormon Problem.” They collectively argue that Romney’s Mormonism will make it hard for him to win the nomination because evangelicals are not fans of the Mormon church, and even harder to win the election because Democrats are more anti-Mormon than GOP primary voters.

The stories are overblown, at least where Republicans are concerned, and I suspect the same is true for the Democrats, as well. Baptist Rev. Robert Jeffress is the Rick Perry supporter who made headlines when he called Mormonism a “cult” and said Romney is not a Christian. This was treated as a “bigotry eruption” even though Jeffress also called Romney a “good, moral person” and said he’d vote for him over President Barack Obama, a former agnostic turned Christian. It’s true the Republican electorate is having a hard time swallowing the idea of Romney as the nominee. But there’s a lot more to digest than his Mormonism.

All of the stories about anti-Mormon prejudice serve to distract from Romney’s real Mormon problem, which we might as well call The Huckabee Problem. Mike Huckabee was a candidate for the Republican nomination in 2008 when he ran against the separation of church and state’s invisible wall. And that is this: There may no longer be a formal barrier to entry, but if you are thought of as a religious leader, American voters will be extremely reluctant to embrace your candidacy.

There are many reasons for this reluctance that have nothing to do with bigotry. Our Puritan forebears revered the position of preacher. They forbade the reverends from running for public office precisely because of that reverence. They thought the religious office was so superior to the political one that they didn’t want to sully the good name of the ministry by dragging it through the mud and the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics.

We’ve done away with that formal barrier to preachers running for office with good reason, but old habits die hard, as Huckabee found out when he was running for office last time. Huckabee had not set out to become a Baptist minister, but he had, in fact, been talked into pastoring a church before he entered politics, and he continued to be involved in churches by preaching on weekends. This confused Republican primary voters, who never could get the idea that Huckabee was a Baptist minister out of their heads. Sure, he had also been the two-term governor of Arkansas, but the Puritan reflexes kicked in all the same, and it hurt him.

Romney has been deeply involved in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In his religion’s almost entirely lay-led, temporary, unpaid command structure, he rose to the positions of bishop and stake president. It’s hard to map those titles exactly onto their non-Mormon equivalents, but Romney himself has admitted that the title “pastor” might be appropriate.

Experts have noticed that Romney has proved extremely reluctant to talk about his Mormonism. Most finger his anti-Mormon fears, but I suggest The Huckabee Problem has a lot more to do with it. Which is a shame, because the more we learn about Mitt the Mormon, the more human he seems, and not in a bad way.

In this election cycle, news stories have told us that when Romney was a Mormon missionary in France, he was in a car wreck so bad that police at the scene assumed he was dead. That didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for his religion one bit.

Later in life, Romney devoted countless unpaid hours and a lot of his own money to try to shepherd his local Mormon congregations through serious challenges. He worked hard to help fellow Mormons, often dropping in on people unannounced to deliver the simple message that God loves them. He counseled people to make wise choices, to strive toward perfection but never to make perfection the enemy of goodness.

Romney’s leadership role in the Mormon church is well in the past. If he doesn’t want to talk about it at length, that’s his business. But to my non-Mormon, non-Republican eyes, these stories and several others have made him more likeable, not less. As a political figure, Romney seems shifty; as a religious one, steadfast.

Jeremy Lott, editor of RealClearReligion and RealClearBooks, is writing a book about death.